Monday, April 27, 2009

Just like a computer with multiple users require restriction and rules on what each user can do on the shared computer, a browser, which is the gateway to the world wide web, requires user access restrictions too.

Public Fox is an addon for Firefox that allows the computer administrator to lock down various areas of the browser on a shared PC. Public Fox password protects the following sections in Firefox:

# Lock downloads: Users can’t download files with specified extensions using Firefox, like EXE, BAT and anything that would like to add. You can also add XPI to prevent installation of new addons.

There are a few issues with this addon though, like the bookmark block didn’t work on my Firefox (version 3.0.1) and one user said that the addon blocking didn’t work in version 3.0.8. Every new update of Firefox is most likely breaking the security restrictions of this addon. Either the developer has to keep up with the fixes or users who want to use this tool will need to downgrade a couple of versions.

You need to change a couple of hidden settings. These settings are accessed by typing about:config into the location bar. If you have locked access to about:config you will need to start Firefox in safe mode to access about:config

Type about:config into the location bar and press enter. This brings up a list or preferences. Locate the preference extensions.dlwatch.password, right-click on it and choose Reset Next find the preference extensions.dlwatch.lock and make sure it is set to false, if it is not double-click on it to change its value.

Help! I have installed public fox, checked everything in the box and made a password but it still does not lock anything! Everything is still accessible and the settings can be changed or the whole thing uninstalled. What do i do to get it to work?